Sad Hygro & hc

This is what I'm dealing with. I have about 8 stems of various species of hygrophila and every few days I'm fishing leaves out of the tank that look like the below picture. Many of the leaves still attached don't look too much better. Some are filled with brown pinholes, some with large transparent patches, and others edges covered in bba.

Tank specs: 12g co2 injected, dosing EI, lights on 8hrs per day. Substrate is fine eco complete. I've been battling algae outbreaks on my HC & hairgrass, with a lesser extent on the hygro. The battle is not going well Only otos & CPDs in the tank so nothing that would eat the plants.

Just looking for where I am going wrong here! This fun hobby is driving me crazy

Bonus sad hairgrass & hc! It's hard to see, but all the dark green on the HC is algae, with the bright red dead algae from Excel treatment. The hairgrass is mostly bad because a lot of it didn't survive planting and I kept hoping for it to come back to life. In the mean time 3 kinds of algae moved in!

If I increase the CO2 any higher, it starts killing my fish. One thing though is the levels don't get high enough to cause this until about 6-7 hours into injection (I start co2 1.5 hours before lights on). My dropchecker turns yellow at around 5-6 hours into injection. My HC begins to pearl around 2 hours before the lights go out at the end of the day. This doesn't seem optimal to me.

Could this be a circulation problem? The bubble rate is constant and can not be increased due to the overdose issue, and seems to be diffusing ok, but at a very slow rate.

I have a 2217 with inflow and outflow both on one side of the tank. I can see the water make a full loop of the top of the tank via the floaters, but I can see there may be some dead spots closer to the surface. I'd rather not throw in an ugly/noisy powerhead but I will if I need to!

The other issue is light. I have 10 cree XT-E's running at 350ma around 1.5 feet above the tank. Too much light, too little? They can be adjusted up to 700ma if desired.

Well I increased my dosing. Previously I was dosing a weeks worth once a week. Now I'm dosing every second day at roughly 2x EI dosing. I read that the holes in the leaves may be caused by lack of Potassium so I'm hoping this helps.

Not sure if I should just rip out all the hairgrass & HC. It's still growing but algae isn't letting up. Unless I solve the underlying issue I fear it will just make things worse.

Any suggestions on how to get back on track with this tank would be much appreciated!

You should inject CO2 at a rate to get saturation in a couple of hours. HC can pearl within a couple of hours. You can adjust your timer to turn off for midday break for levels to normalize so you don't OD. Hmm a 12gal shouldn't have flow issues with the setup you use. Perhaps things are just going through a stabilization phrase if you changed variables recently? Algae can bloom during periods of destabilization and takes a while to die off even when balance returns.

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